The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A “boot storm” refers to a storage device being shared by multiple virtual machines (VM's) and all VM's are started (or booted) at roughly the same time. This is a typical problem in the server computer of a centralized client-server system, which may have multiple thin clients. For example, a company may start its office hour at 9 a.m. The employees who work in the office of company may all start work around 9 a.m., and as a result, they all turn on their computers (i.e. thin client terminals) around 9 a.m. Each computer terminal in the booting process will start a VM at the centralized server, and the booting process does heavy disk input/output (I/O). When multiple VM's start together around the same time, the disk I/O at the server goes beyond the sustainable level and causes the boot storm. The boot storm affects the startup time of the VM's. The startup time grows exponentially against the number of VM's started at the same time.
Currently, there are different ways to handle the boot storm problem. For example, the server may use high speed solid state drives (SSD) as the storage device to increase the disk I/O speed. In some cases, the server may use RAM disk drivers or other memory disk drivers to implement memory-emulated disk to increase the disk I/O speed. However, these methods generally induce high hardware or software costs, and may be power consuming.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.